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Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the CDC said

nytimes.com

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Re: Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the CDC said

#601

Post by refurb »

distances wrote: post #542
refurb wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that surprising. It's pretty clear the EU health regulatory agencies aren't much better. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... 500 to 2000 people died in France because the regulatory authorities choose to ignore multiple warning signs the drug has issues. Maybe you shouldn't be so trusting?

It's not like we expect everything to go perfectly. I do trust that bureaucrats and officials are competent with good intentions though. I do trust the police, tax authorities, medical authorities, statistics department. I even trust the politicians work towards their stated goals and ideals, each aiming for what they consider the best for the country. I'm from the Nordics, with a pretty good track record of honesty…

It might be a sad world but it’s reality. Better than pretending your politicians are altruistic.

Re: Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the CDC said

#602

Post by serf »

MomoXenosaga wrote: post #364
ComputerGuru wrote: post #220

How cynical is it to question whether or not this was timed at least in part to bolster economic outlook in the face of the market shrinkage this week over inflation fears? (Experts have been asking for more explicit guidance from the CDC for months now.) Edit: for reference, up until this point, the CDC has not even been willing to concede the safety of outdoor activities: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/11/briefing…

Americans are very patriotic. Singing the national anthem and waving the flag is second nature. I don't think a conspiracy is needed: every opportunity to show how great America is will be used.

>Americans are very patriotic. Singing the national anthem and waving the flag is second nature.

I'm pretty sick of these kind of nation-based generalizations.

They're never as true as the person pretends they are, and they're usually just thinnly-veiled hate speech of various types.

Generalizing other human beings by what country they were given membership to -- usually uncontrolled by birth, by the way -- is about the weakest way to gain an insight into the persona of another person.

Re: Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the CDC said

#603

Post by refurb »

maxerickson wrote: post #594
refurb wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Check out Singapore’s latest cluster. Multiple fully vaccinated people infected (9 at last count) who are spreading it to others.

https://www.moh.gov.sg/news-highlights/details/24-new-cases-... has the cases, with vaccination information. I think there's not enough information there to make conclusions about the vaccines. There's roughly a million vaccinated people in Singapore, a small number of people that are vaccinated and still get sick is expected even with very efficacious vaccines.

Don’t get me wrong. The vaccines are great at preventing severe disease. But they won’t prevent an outbreak of 20-30% of your population is unvaccinated.

Data seem to point at keeping some level of restrictions until everyone who is vulnerable has an opportunity to get the vaccine. Otherwise you’ll be dealing with outbreaks - smaller in scale, but outbreaks none the less.

Re: Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the CDC said

#604

Post by watwut »

cm2187 wrote: post #592
generj wrote: post #3

It’s good to give better incentives for people to be vaccinated, as many have urged for some time. I worry this carrot isn’t tied to an adequate stick - the unvaccinated can simply go without a mask regardless of their status. Will this move actually counter our slowing vaccination rates?

So wearing a mask as a punishment? That will further trust in public health policies.

Unvaccinated should wear mask, because they are more likely to spread it. Vaccinated dont have to wear mask, because they are less likely to spread it.

Making masks into that big punishment and unfairness definitely killed my trust into whole lot of people and groups of people.

Re: Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the CDC said

#605

Post by lovetocode »

walrus01 wrote: post #434

I have a personal theory that humans do not fully understand death rate when it's spread out widely across many geographic areas. Let's say, for instance, that the covid19 death rate is about 450 people a day. It might be more or less than that right now, I haven't specifically checked (but I do recall that it's easily been 2000-3000 a day for some periods of time in very recent memory). But that might be 450 people…

COVID largely impacted only the geriatric and obese. If the airplane were full of women and children then your analogy would be more poignant.

Edit: interesting note … if you were to take the number of deaths in the Second World War that would amount to 86 fully loaded 747 aircraft flying into the side of a mountain per day for six years.

Re: Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the CDC said

#606

Post by ceejayoz »

josephcsible wrote: post #254

I find it interesting that the people who screamed "trust/listen to the CDC!" the loudest when the CDC's position was "everyone wear your mask and stay home as much as you can" are now the ones looking hardest for reasons to ignore/downplay/criticize the CDC's guidance.

One must evaluate the consequences of not following a particular piece of advice.

If masks work, and you don’t wear one, you are potentially killing people and worsening the pandemic.

If they aren’t needed, and you do wear one anyways, no harm has been done.

Re: Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the CDC said

#607

Post by cout »

ptaipale wrote: post #537
sokoloff wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately, we’re not. In between, there was a vaccine developed and deployed and the science strongly (overwhelmingly is probably more precise) suggests that fully vaccinated people are at minimal risk to themselves and minimal risk to spread, which is of course the entire point of vaccines and entirely unsurprising given our understanding and long experience with other vaccines, which almost all exhibited the same…

I quite agree, but I think the message from health authorities has also been problematic here: they repeated that "vaccinated individuals will still spread the infection". That is true of course: some vaccinated individuals will still spread the infection because efficacy is not 100 %. But the public has, predictably, got this message wrong: I keep getting told that "vaccinated people will get the infection and sprea…

Yes, that's the confusing bit.

In February, the CDC said that those with the vaccine can have asymptomatic infections (https://web.archive.org/web/20210209162120/https://www.cdc.g...). The NY Times used the term "silent spreaders".

Then in March the CDC's guidance was to continue wearing a mask after vaccination, except in situations where transmission risk was minimal (such as when everyone present has been vaccinated). They said we should do this while we're still learning about how vaccines affect the spread of the virus (https://web.archive.org/web/20210308164227/https://www.cdc.g...).

Now the CDC is saying fully vaccinated individuals do not need to wear a mask (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vac...), but no reason has been given for the change on that page. Were they wrong on asymptomatic infections in fully vaccinated individuals, or has the risk of spread simply been lowered because of the number of individuals who have received a vaccine?

Without knowing the reason behind the change in guidance (I'm sure there is one), I find it easy to be cynical and distrusting.

Re: Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the CDC said

#608

Post by mensetmanusman »

em500 wrote: post #431
bonzini wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chinese scientists cottoned on to this very early China didn't even admit human to human transmission until mid January. They haven't even admitted when the outbreak started, which almost certainly wasn't November 2019 since there are suspect cases in Europe already at the beginning of December, of people that had never been in Wuhan.

> there are suspect cases in Europe already at the beginning of December, of people that had never been in Wuhan. If this is true, then it's not a given that COVID-19 even originated in China.

The not-China origin idea is fringe at the moment.

Re: Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the CDC said

#609

Post by cout »

anoncake wrote: post #587
DanBC wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also vaccinate them so they don't infect people who can't be vaccinated.

If their own health wouldn't justify a vaccination, we should stop that. They can still consent to get vaccinated out of altruism when they're adult.

Insurance might not cover some vaccinations for an adult. I know for certain this is the case for HPV; it may also be true for others.

Re: Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the CDC said

#610

Post by o-__-o »

cout wrote: post #494
ddxxdd wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 weeks of asymptomatic spread has been known about since late January (edit: in 2020). [0] And Fauci said at one point (2/14/2020): “There is no reason for anyone right now in the United States, with regard to coronavirus, to wear a mask” [1] And at another point (6/15/2020): "[...] we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal pro…

The director of the CDC during most of the pandemic was Robert Redfield. Dr. Fauci is director of the NIH, so his statements are not relevant to the credibility of the CDC. In defense of Dr. Fauci's statement, saying "there is no reason right now to wear a mask" is quite different from "masks are ineffective", as it keeps getting paraphrased. The latter is obviously absurd, as there were numerous studies on the effec…

Fauci had said the reason they made a misspeak about masks is because they were afraid there would not be enough for first responders
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